TY - JOUR T1 - Social learning strategies regulate the wisdom and madness of interactive crowds JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/326637 SP - 326637 AU - Wataru Toyokawa AU - Andrew Whalen AU - Kevin N. Laland Y1 - 2018/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/06/19/326637.abstract N2 - Why groups of individuals sometimes exhibit collective ‘wisdom’ and other times maladaptive ‘herding’ is an enduring conundrum. Here we show that this conflict is regulated by the social learning strategies deployed. We examined the patterns of human social learning through an interactive online experiment with 699 participants, varying both task uncertainty and group size, then used hierarchical Bayesian model-fitting to identify the individual learning strategies exhibited by participants. Challenging tasks elicit greater conformity amongst individuals, with rates of copying increasing with group size, leading to high probabilities of maladaptive herding amongst large groups confronted with uncertainty. Conversely, the reduced social learning of small groups, and the greater probability that social information would be accurate for less-challenging tasks, generated ‘wisdom of the crowd’ effects in other circumstances. Our model-based approach provides novel evidence that the likelihood of swarm intelligence versus herding can be predicted, resolving a longstanding puzzle in the literature. ER -